Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

by Stephen Kinzer

Much of their data was unique because it could come only from experiments in which human beings were made to suffer or die. That made Blome a valuable target—but a target for what? Justice cried out for his punishment. From a U.S. Army base in Maryland, however, came an audaciously contrary idea: instead of hanging Blome, let’s hire him.

Whenever a scientist they coveted turned out to have a blemish on his record, they rewrote his biography. They systematically expunged references to membership in the SS, collaboration with the Gestapo, abuse of slave laborers, and experiments on human subjects. Applicants who had been rated by interrogators as “ardent Nazi” were re-categorized as “not an ardent Nazi.” References to their exemplary family lives were added. Once they had been thus “bleached,” they became suitable candidates for Paperclip contracts.

Unlike their German counterparts, however, they were not brought to the United States. Instead the Japanese scientists were installed at laboratories and detention centers in East Asia. There they helped Americans conceive and carry out experiments on human subjects that could not be legally conducted in the United States.

While the Americans protected veterans of Unit 731, the Soviets captured twelve of them and charged them with war crimes.

Clearly he had been coerced—but how? At the CIA, the answer seemed terrifyingly obvious: the Soviets had developed drugs or mind control techniques that could make people say things they did not believe. No evidence of this ever emerged. Mindszenty was coerced with traditional techniques like ill treatment, extended isolation, beatings, and repetitive interrogation. The fear that Communists had discovered some potent new psychoactive tool, however, sent a shock wave through the CIA. It also gave Camp Detrick a new mission.

“In our conversation of 9 February 1951,” Dulles wrote, “I outlined to you the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc., and emphasized the defensive aspects as well as the offensive opportunities in this field of applied medical science. The enclosed folder, ‘Interrogation Techniques,’ was prepared by my Medical Division to provide you with a suitable background.” Dulles added that this “augmenting” could only be carried out overseas because many of its aspects were “not permitted by the United States government (i.e., anthrax etc.).”

Camp King was home base for the “rough boys,” a handful of Counterintelligence Corps officers known for abusing prisoners. Some of their methods were traditional, like immersing victims in freezing water or forcing them to run through gauntlets of soldiers who beat them with baseball bats and other weapons. Others were pharmacological. They injected some victims with Metrazol, which was thought to loosen tongues but also causes violent contortions, and others with cocktails of mescaline, heroin, and amphetamines. Victims’ screams sometimes echoed through the base.

At Camp King they had a site where they could test any drug or coercive technique. They had a ready supply of human subjects. If any died, disposing of their bodies would be “no problem.” Best of all, since their work would be in American-occupied West Germany, they were beyond the reach of law.

As the CIA promoted the belief that Communists had mastered “brainwashing” techniques, the Agency fell under the spell of its own propaganda. Allen Dulles and other senior officers were seized by the fear that they were losing a decisive race. That led them not only to justify extreme drug experiments, but to convince themselves that America’s national security demanded them. “There was deep concern over the issue of brainwashing,” Richard Helms explained years later.

Several months before his apparent poisoning, Glickman had been treated for hepatitis at the American Hospital. Artichoke researchers were interested in learning whether people with hepatitis might be especially vulnerable to LSD. Glickman would have been the ideal subject for a test. A later CIA memo summarizing results of experiments conducted during the early 1950s includes this conclusion: “Subjects in whom even a slight modification of hepatic function is present make a very marked response to LSD.”

These two Americans, both masters of covert power, could hardly have been more different. White was an adrenaline-driven libertine with a sadistic streak who was rarely sober and reveled in life at the violent fringes of society. Gottlieb was a scientist who ate yogurt.

During his meeting with Gottlieb, Mulholland agreed to teach CIA officers how to distract victims’ attention so drugs could be given to them without anyone’s noticing. “Our interest was in sleight-of-hand practices, in the art of surreptitious delivery or removal,” Gottlieb said later. “Those that were trained became pretty good at it. In some ways, the training was a welcomed relief from more serious matters.”

4), a manual was prepared by Mr. Mulholland dealing with the application of the magician’s art to covert activities such as the delivery of various materials to unwilling subjects

Soon after launching MK-ULTRA, Gottlieb found a physician to conduct them: Harris Isbell, director of research at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Officially this center was a hospital, but it functioned more like a prison. The Bureau of Prisons co-administered it with the Public Health Service. Most inmates were African Americans from the margins of society. They were unlikely to complain if abused. That made them fine subjects for clandestine drug experiments.

Isbell combined a fervent interest in psychoactive drugs with a ready supply of prisoners and a willingness to use them as research subjects. That made him an ideal MK-ULTRA contractor.

“The deal was pretty simple,” one investigator later wrote. “The CIA needed a place to test dangerous and possibly addictive drugs; Isbell had a large number of drug users in no position to complain. From the early 1950s onward, the Agency shipped LSD, with any number of other potentially dangerous narcotics, to Kentucky to be tested on human guinea pigs.”

Later it turned out that one of Isbell’s victims was William Henry Wall, a physician and former state senator from Georgia who had become addicted to the painkiller Demerol after a dental procedure. In 1953 he was arrested on drug charges, convicted, and sentenced to a term at the Addiction Research Center. There he became a subject in Isbell’s LSD experiments. They left him mentally crippled. For the rest of his life he suffered from delusions, paranoia, panic attacks, and suicidal impulses. A book that his son later wrote about the case is entitled From Healing to Hell.

While Alice was being informed of her husband’s death at her home in Maryland, Lashbrook was welcoming the CIA cavalry to his room at the Statler Hotel in New York. It took the form of a single officer. In internal reports he is called “Agent James McC.” Later he was identified as James McCord, who would go on to become a footnote to American political history as one of the Watergate burglars. McCord had previously been an FBI agent specializing in counterintelligence. Making police investigations evaporate was one of his specialties.

Some of these drug experiments required risking the health of participants, like one at the Walter E. Fernald School in Massachusetts in which mentally handicapped children were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium.

The experiments proceeded for several years at Cornell Medical Center, at a cost to the CIA of nearly $140,000. Patients were told that the drugs they were given and the procedures they underwent were essential to their treatment. Wolff’s chillingly ambiguous purpose was to study “changes in behavior due to stress brought about by actual loss of cerebral tissues.”

The range of its other projects reflects Gottlieb’s unflagging imagination: studies of the Mongoloid skull, the effect of owning a fallout shelter on foreign policy views, and the emotional impact of circumcision on Turkish boys; tests to determine whether interrogators could use “isolation, anxiety, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger” to produce “profound disturbances of mood [and] excruciating pain”; and research into trance states and “activation of the human organism by remote electronic means.” As MK-ULTRA reached its peak, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology became the principal portal through which Gottlieb lured talented scientists into his “subproject” netherworld.

To cleanse unwanted thoughts from a patient’s mind, Cameron used a technique he called “psychic driving,” in which he administered electroconvulsive shocks that reached thirty to forty times the strength other psychiatrists used. After days of this treatment, the patient was moved to a solitary ward. There he or she was fed LSD and given only minimal amounts of food, water, and oxygen. Cameron fitted patients with helmets equipped with earphones, into which he piped phrases or messages like “My mother hates me,” repeated hundreds of thousands of times.

A review conducted decades later concluded that Cameron’s techniques had “no therapeutic validity whatsoever” and were “comparable to Nazi medical atrocities.” While the experiments were underway, however, Gottlieb found them irresistible. As soon as one was completed, he sent Cameron money to conduct more.

“If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it ourselves,” one MK-ULTRA man said later, “we sent it to San Francisco.”

Little is known about the experiments that CIA scientists conducted at Gorman Annex, although the Agency later confirmed that terminally ill patients were among the subjects. Pressed for details two decades later, Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner replied, “There is no factual evidence of what went on. It is just missing. It is not that it didn’t happen.”

Senator Russell asserted in a speech that it would be better to abolish the CIA than to subject it to possibly unfriendly oversight.

“Throughout the 1950s and for some time beyond, the Agency was less than a welcoming place for Jews and racial minorities,” he recalled years later. “Those who were actually ever hired or involved in operations learned rather quickly to keep their heads down when certain matters were discussed.”

The CIA has not declassified files that would provide details of Gottlieb’s work in Munich. Half a century later, however, the German magazine Der Spiegel discovered and published a document showing that in 1958—while Gottlieb was stationed in Munich—German counterintelligence agents informed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that CIA officers were arresting people in Germany “without the knowledge of German authorities, imprisoning them at times for months, and subjecting them to forms of interrogation forbidden by German law.”

According to another description, the needle was “designed to be so fine that the target (Castro) would not sense its insertion and the agent would have time to escape before the effects were noticed.” The date on which a CIA officer in Paris handed this pen to a Cuban CIA “asset” is poignant: November 22, 1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, continued to use political and economic means, including sabotage and other forms of covert action, to undermine Cuba’s revolutionary government. He also, however, concluded that “we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” and put an end to assassination plots.

Years of relentless MK-ULTRA experiments pushed him inexorably toward an unwelcome conclusion: there is no way to take control of another person’s mind.

That secrecy began to unravel in the pre-dawn hours of June 17, 1972. A security guard at the Watergate complex in Washington noticed a piece of tape over a door lock at the office of the Democratic National Committee. He called the police. Several intruders were arrested. They turned out to have connections to the White House and the CIA. Gottlieb’s Technical Services Division had prepared false identity papers for two of them, Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, and had provided Hunt with implements of espionage including a speech alteration device, a camera concealed in a tobacco pouch, and a wig-and-glasses disguise.

On January 30, 1973, seven boxes of documents were shredded.

The Rockefeller Commission’s report, issued on June 11, 1975, was as mild as circumstances allowed. It concluded that the CIA had carried out “plainly unlawful” operations, including spying on protest groups, tapping phones, committing burglaries, and opening mail. Stories about assassination plots against foreign leaders had begun to circulate in Washington, but the commission report said that “time did not permit a full investigation.”

A lawsuit, if allowed to proceed, would give the family, as well as homicide detectives in New York, a tool they could use to force disclosure of deep secrets. President Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy Dick Cheney, recognized the danger. Cheney warned Rumsfeld in a memo that a lawsuit might force the CIA “to disclose highly classified national security information.”

Toward the end he wrote a letter to Gottlieb, thanking him for the chance to serve the United States while feeding his own appetites. His words are a unique tribute to MK-ULTRA. “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun,” White wrote. “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty good stuff, Brudder!”

A forensic pathologist, James Starrs of George Washington University Law School, spent a month studying Olson’s body. When he was finished, he called a news conference. His tests for toxins in the body, he reported, had turned up nothing. The wound pattern, however, was curious. Starrs had found no glass shards on the victim’s head or neck, as might be expected if he had dived through a window. Most intriguingly, although Olson had reportedly landed on his back, the skull above his left eye was disfigured. “I would venture to say that this hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of room 1018A,” Starrs concluded. Later he was more emphatic: “I think Frank Olson was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.”

The handoffs are clear: from Kurt Blome and Shiro Ishii to the directors of the Bluebird project, later renamed Artichoke; from Artichoke to Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA; from MK-ULTRA to KUBARK Counter-Intelligence Interrogation; from there to the Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual; and from those manuals to Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and CIA “black sites” around the world. Gottlieb is an indispensable link in this grim chain.

Commitment to a cause provides the ultimate justification for immoral acts. Patriotism is among the most seductive of those causes. It posits the nation as a value so transcendent that anything done in its service is virtuous.